William Dobson was a portraitist and one of the first significant English painters, praised by his contemporary John Aubrey as "the most excellent painter that England has yet bred". He died relatively young and his final years were disrupted by the English Civil War.
George Vertue was an English engraver and antiquary, whose notebooks on British art of the first half of the 18th century are a valuable source for the period.
John Maler CollierOBE RP ROI was a British painter and writer. He painted in the Pre-Raphaelite style, and was one of the most prominent portrait painters of his generation. Both of his marriages were to daughters of Thomas Henry Huxley. He studied painting in Paris with Jean-Paul Laurens and at the Munich Academy starting in 1875.
John Smibert was a Scottish-born painter, regarded as the first academically trained artist to live and work regularly in British America.
Cornelius Johnson or Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen was an English painter of portraits of Dutch or Flemish parentage. He was active in England, from at least 1618 to 1643, when he moved to Middelburg in the Netherlands to escape the English Civil War. Between 1646 and 1652 he lived in Amsterdam, before settling in Utrecht, where he died.
Mary Beale was an English portrait painter. She was part of a small band of female professional artists working in London. Beale became the main financial provider for her family through her professional work – a career she maintained from 1670/71 to the 1690s. Beale was also a writer, whose prose Discourse on Friendship of 1666 presents scholarly, uniquely female take on the subject. Her 1663 manuscript Observations, on the materials and techniques employed "in her painting of Apricots", though not printed, is the earliest known instructional text in English written by a female painter. Praised first as a "virtuous" practitioner in "Oyl Colours" by Sir William Sanderson in his 1658 book Graphice: Or The use of the Pen and Pensil; In the Excellent Art of PAINTING, Beale's work was later commended by court painter Sir Peter Lely and, soon after her death, by the author of "An Essay towards an English-School", his account of the most noteworthy artists of her generation.
John Vanderbank was a leading English portrait painter who enjoyed a high reputation during the last decade of King George I's reign and remained in high fashion in the first decade of King George II's reign. George Vertue's opinion was that only intemperance and extravagance prevented Vanderbank from being the greatest portraitist of his generation, his lifestyle bringing him into repeated financial difficulties and leading to an early death at the age of only 45.
Sir Peter Lely was a painter of Dutch origin whose career was nearly all spent in England, where he became the dominant portrait painter to the court.
Abraham van der Doort was a Dutch artist. As Keeper of Charles I's art collections, he was the first Surveyor of the King's Pictures.
The artists of the Tudor court are the painters and limners engaged by the monarchs of England's Tudor dynasty and their courtiers between 1485 and 1603, from the reign of Henry VII to the death of Elizabeth I.
John Michael Wright was an English or Scottish portrait painter in the Baroque style. Wright trained in Edinburgh under the Scots painter George Jamesone, and acquired a considerable reputation as an artist and scholar during a long sojourn in Rome. There he was admitted to the Accademia di San Luca, and was associated with some of the leading artists of his generation. He was engaged by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria, the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, to acquire artworks in Oliver Cromwell's England in 1655. He took up permanent residence in England from 1656, and served as court painter before and after the English Restoration. A convert to Roman Catholicism, he was a favourite of the restored Stuart court, a client of both Charles II and James II, and was a witness to many of the political manoeuvrings of the era. In the final years of the Stuart monarchy he returned to Rome as part of an embassy to Pope Innocent XI.
Robert Peake the Elder was an English painter active in the later part of Elizabeth I's reign and for most of the reign of James I. In 1604, he was appointed picture maker to the heir to the throne, Prince Henry; and in 1607, serjeant-painter to King James I – a post he shared with John De Critz. Peake is often called "the elder", to distinguish him from his son, the painter and print seller William Peake and from his grandson, Sir Robert Peake, who followed his father into the family print-selling business.
Alexis Simon Belle was a French portrait painter, known for his portraits of the French and Jacobite nobility. As a portrait artist, Belle's style followed that of his master François de Troy, Hyacinthe Rigaud, and Nicolas de Largillière. He was the master of the painter Jacques-André-Joseph-Camelot Aved (1702–1766).
Isaac Sailmaker was a Dutch marine painter of the Baroque period who had a long artistic career in Britain.
Philippe Mercier was an artist of French Huguenot descent from the German realm of Brandenburg-Prussia, usually defined to French school. Active in England for most part of his lifetime, Mercier is considered one of the first practitioners of the Rococo style, and is credited for influencing a new generation of 18th-century English artists.
Joseph van Aken was a Flemish artist, a portrait, genre and drapery painter who spent most of his career in England. He was noted for his skill in painting fabrics, and was employed as a costume painter by many leading artists.
Bartholomew Dandridge was an English portrait painter.
John Smith was an English mezzotint engraver and print seller. Closely associated with the portrait painter Godfrey Kneller, Smith was one of leading exponents of the mezzotint medium during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and was regarded among first English-born artists to receive international recognition, along the younger painter William Hogarth.
Richard Phelps (1710–1785) was an 18th-century English portrait painter and designer. He painted portraits of gentry, a number of which are in the National Trust, Dunster Castle, University of Oxford, National Portrait Gallery, London, and other museums. The British Museum has an album of 312 of his drawings. Phelps was also a landscape designer, who was hired by Henry Fownes Luttrell to update the grounds of Dunster Castle.
Charles Philips (c.1703–1747) was an English artist known for painting a number of portraits and conversation pieces for noble and Royal patrons in the mid-eighteenth century.
